In recent years, reconfigurable circuits (programmable logic circuits) such as field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and programmable logic devices (PLDs) have such a high degree of flexibility that they can achieve extremely various circuits, and therefore they have been widely used in the fields of digital circuit devices and the likes. However, there is a problem in such reconfigurable circuits that since they use a huge amount of switches to achieve the high degree of flexibility, the circuit size becomes larger and the costs increase.
To solve this problem, it is conceivable to apply an application-specific reconfigurable circuit of which the application area (applications) is limited so that it has minimum flexibility sufficient to cover that particular application area. Although this application-specific reconfigurable circuit has limited flexibility in comparison to the general-purpose circuits, it has an advantage that the circuit size can be significantly reduced.
Meanwhile, information processing systems in which, in order to specify a circuit to be formed in a programmable logic circuit, a designated circuit is formed in the programmable logic circuit by using circuit information designated by an application program have been known (for example, see Patent literature 1).